We spent two Saturdays in November holding our first yard sale and selling our wares as vendors at a flea market.

I’m super stoked to be writing this post — and not just because it’s something other than an income report. 🙂 I’m excited to write this post because I’ve always had questions in the back of my mind about yard sales and flea markets (particularly about whether or not they are lucrative and worth the time).

Now that I have some experience under my belt, I hope that this post will be helpful to someone looking for another outlet besides eBay for their merchandise.

Our Yard Sale Experience

Several months ago, our garage reached it’s breaking point. We simply couldn’t fit any more merchandise in there and I wasn’t listing our eBay inventory fast enough. I kept trying to convince Hubby that we should hold a garage sale, but he was totally against have “random people” in our driveway or “random people” knowing what we had hidden behind our garage door.

He changed his mind in October when he realized that if we were going to get rid of our excess eBay inventory before the new year, we had to find another outlet for it. We actually held our first yard sale during the beginning of November and while I didn’t feel that we had too much foot traffic, we got rid of some merchandise and made a little over $900 in one day doing so.

Consider this post the equivalent of my debt free scream! As of 10/7/2015, I have officially paid off my Sallie Mae / Navient student loan debt!

Yes, I know that this post is long overdue and I should have shouted this from the rooftops last month, but it is better late than never!

The Backstory

Back in 2013, Hubby and I welcomed our first child into our family. We knew before getting married and becoming parents that I would stay at home to raise any children that we had, but I was unsettled at the fact that as I left the workforce, I still had over $14k in student loans that needed to be repaid and I had no income (outside of my husband’s) to pay it off.

We were content for a while with paying only the minimum balance, but reality hit me one day after my student loans were sold to Sallie Mae. Sallie Mae sent me a letter detailing my payoff schedule. They estimated that if I only paid the minimum balance each month, I would pay off my loans in 2023. That would mean that my daughter would be 10 years old when I made my last student loan payment.

It was at that moment that I set out to bring in some extra money to get rid of those loans and that’s precisely why I ventured down the path of becoming a reseller (…the results of this endeavor has been detailed on this blog).

I do believe this is the first time in a while that I’ve gotten an income report out on time — dare I say, the first time I’ve ever released one on the first day of the month! I apologize for being behind in updates and responding to comments. I took a much needed but far too long break, but I hope to be back on schedule now that things have calmed down.

With that said, August turned out to be a good month overall for us. We made some significant strides in our long-term business goals (outside of re-selling) and we also hit some milestones as well. Our biggest accomplishment in August was finally bringing some help on board. Our newest employee officially began working on August 6th. 🙂 She has taken a huge burden off of my shoulders and she is largely responsible for me being able to find the time to blog again. In other news, we hit an eBay sales milestone this month and hopefully it won’t be the last.

Disclaimer:

As I usually preface in most of my income reports, the figures that I report below are from part-time re-selling. The hours that I put in fluctuate from 2 to 15 hours per week. My first and full-time job is my family and my home. I occasionally have the help of my husband and that equates to approximately 1 to 6 hours per week. Re-selling is something that we both do on the side and unless our circumstances change, it will remain a part-time venture. With that in mind, if you can dedicate full-time hours to re-selling, your numbers will in all likelihood be higher than those that I report on this blog.

We entered the month of July on a high note. As I mentioned in June’s income report, we made a rather large liquidation purchase and we were able to get it out the door and into Amazon’s warehouse right around the 2nd of the month. By July 3rd we were back to having $1k+ sales days after our slump in sales in June and on July 7th we experienced our highest post-Q4 sales day which was $195 shy of a $4k sales day. Things were going great for us up until July 16th when we received a “suspended” notification from Amazon…

Disclaimer:

As I usually preface in most of my income reports, the figures that I report below are from part-time re-selling. The hours that I put in fluctuate from 2 to 15 hours per week. My first and full-time job is my family and my home. I occasionally have the help of my husband and that equates to approximately 1 to 6 hours per week. No week looks the same for us. Re-selling is something that we both do on the side and unless our circumstances change, it will remain a part-time venture. With that in mind, if you can dedicate full-time hours to re-selling, your numbers will in all likelihood be higher than those that I report on this blog.

With that out of the way, let’s jump into the numbers and more details about our suspension…

eBay Sales

Unfortunately, our eBay sales took a backseat once again this month. This was mainly due to processing the 8 pallets worth of goods that we liquidated in June and then dealing with an Amazon suspension. I only managed to list only a few items for the month. Here are the numbers:

This post is almost 2 months overdue (at the time of writing), but I’ve finally found some time to sit down and recap what has been going on since I last blogged.

June’s income report will be rather short. The month of June did not involve much in the way of re-selling. Instead, Hubby and I spent that time preparing for and teaching Vacation Bible School once again as well as attending graduations and taking a mini-sourcing vacation. As a consequence, our Amazon sales took a huge dip but we did have a good month on eBay…all things considered.

Without further ado, here are the numbers…

eBay Sales

I hunkered down in June to get some much needed listings up. If you can’t tell, I really don’t like the listing process!

Most of our sales didn’t take place until the end of the month once we were through travelling and teaching Vacation Bible School. Even with only 2.5 weeks worth of listing and sales under our belt, we were very close to hitting $1k in profit for the month. Here are numbers (nicely formatted and calculated thanks to Easy Auctions Tracker):

These numbers are the result of 56 sold listings. Our average sales price was $30.81 and 100% of our sales were liquidation items that have been sitting unlisted for quite some time. Some of the electronic items had been unlisted since January.